Belmond Hotel Caruso wedding

The palace was built in the 11th century by the d’Afflitto family, who had been on their way to Constantinople when their ship was wrecked, and settled in Ravello instead. It was largely destroyed when Pisa sacked Ravello and Amalfi, and it lay empty until it was rebuilt from the middle of the 1500s.

In 1893 Pantaleone Caruso and his wife Emilia Cicalese rented five rooms in one of its wings and opened the Pensione Belvedere, named for the view from its hanging gardens. Their sons ran it after them, and for a century it was where the people who came to Ravello stayed: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Jackie Kennedy.

The Caruso holds a Michelin Key, the Guide’s distinction for hotels. Orient-Express bought it in 2005 and it has been a Belmond hotel since 2014. The frescoes are original to the palace and were restored rather than replaced, under vaulted ceilings the d’Afflitto builders would recognise.

It sits at the highest point of Ravello, three hundred metres above the sea, and nothing stands between its gardens and the water below.

A buy-out opens every space in the hotel to the wedding, and the terms set out a clear order for the day: ceremony and dinner in the gardens, the party at the pool, the last of the night indoors.

Terraced gardens of roses, lemon trees and old olive trees, laid out along the edge of the cliff and named for the composer who found his garden of Klingsor in Ravello. The ceremony goes here, under the olive trees, for up to 80 but not beyond: a larger ceremony moves into the town, a few minutes’ walk away. The cocktail hour and the dinner stay here at any size the hotel takes.

If the weather turns, the cocktail moves indoors to the Belvedere restaurant and bar, and the dinner to the Colonne and Wagner rooms, two halls that combine into one.

The Caruso’s heated infinity pool is the hotel’s signature, a long blue edge that seems to run straight off the cliff into the sea three hundred metres below. It is where the party goes after dinner, with a DJ until midnight.

Beside it sit the pool bar under its umbrellas and the Caruso Grill, which makes Neapolitan pizza from a brick oven. For a wedding weekend, the pool is also the welcome drinks, the long lunch the day after, and the place everyone ends up in between.

The hotel’s restaurant, on a terrace over the coast, cooking the food of Campania under chef Armando Aristarco. For a buy-out it carries the welcome dinner, and it is the indoor answer for a wet cocktail hour.

The bar is where the evening starts and where it finishes, with a piano in the lounge from seven. The Krug Table, made from an 18th-century door of the old palace, seats a small private dinner paired with Krug champagne, and it is the right place for the couple’s families on the night before.

Fifty rooms and suites, most of them with sea views from their terraces and many with a private garden. A buy-out includes every one of them, and at a hundred guests the whole wedding sleeps inside the palace.

The rooms run from superior rooms opening onto the garden to junior suites and terrace suites over the sea, and then the three Divina suites, each ninety square metres in the terraced gardens with space outside for a private dinner. No two rooms are alike, and the frescoes and vaulted ceilings are as much a part of them as the view.

Villa Margherita, a few steps from the hotel, adds two more suites with their own entrance, lounge and dining room, sleeping eight between them. It is the natural home for the couple’s parents, or for the couple themselves on the nights either side of the wedding.

We allocate the rooms with the couple rather than by category.

The sea-view terraces go to the people who will use them at dawn, and the connecting rooms to families with children.

The Caruso is at the top of Ravello, on the Piazza San Giovanni del Toro, a short walk from the cathedral square, Villa Rufolo and Villa Cimbrone. Amalfi is eight minutes down the hill by road, and the hotel runs a shuttle to it.

Ravello sits on its ridge three hundred and fifty metres above Amalfi, and that height is the whole character of a wedding here: cooler evenings than the coast below, gardens rather than beaches, and a town that goes quiet after the day visitors leave.

Naples Capodichino is the main airport, an hour and a quarter on a clear road and an hour and a half as a planning figure. Salerno’s airport is 45 minutes away, and from Ravello, unlike the western end of the coast, it is genuinely the nearer choice. For American guests, connecting through Rome or Milan into Naples beats the four-hour drive from Rome Fiumicino.

Salerno station is 35 minutes from the hotel and Napoli Centrale an hour and five, and both take the high-speed trains from Rome and Milan. The hotel arranges transfers from either.

The hotel has its own boat, built for it by the Aprea family, and a wooden gozzo that runs guests along the coast each morning. For a wedding it turns the day before into a trip to Positano or Capri, and it brings guests staying elsewhere on the coast to the foot of the hill by water.

For a wedding taken as a buy-out, the Caruso is sold one way: the whole hotel, three nights at least, with a minimum spend on food and drink, starting from around €840,000 before VAT. Each date is priced when it is requested, and one party contracts for all of it.

• All fifty rooms and suites, and the two suites of Villa Margherita
• The Wagner Gardens, the infinity pool, the Belvedere, the Colonne and Wagner rooms and the bar
• The hotel’s own tables, chairs, linen and tableware for every event

The hotel supplies the room and the table, and nothing that decorates it. The flowers, the styling and any furniture beyond the standard set, the lighting, the entertainment and the sound all come from outside suppliers, and the civil or church ceremony is arranged with the town rather than the hotel.

A smaller wedding can also use the gardens and the pool terrace without taking the whole hotel, with at least eight rooms reserved; for anything over ninety, the hotel recommends the buy-out.

A Magic Day buy-out wedding at Belmond Hotel Caruso starts at €1 million and lands near €1.2 million. The hotel is the largest part of that, and everything it leaves to outside suppliers is the rest.

At a hundred guests, the beds and the wedding are the same number. Fifty rooms and suites hold a hundred, and Villa Margherita takes the family. That is the size we recommend here, because nobody spends the evening watching the time for a car back down the coast.

The music hours are an order of events, not a curfew. Acoustic in the gardens until ten, a DJ at the pool until midnight, and indoors until two. We build the evening around those three stages, so the party changes rooms at the moment it would otherwise have to quieten down.

Above eighty, the ceremony leaves the hotel, and that can be the better wedding. The Duomo of Ravello is four hundred metres away, and a procession through the town square to a palace garden is a start of its own. For a civil ceremony, the town hall and the Principessa di Piemonte gardens are a few minutes’ walk.

Fly into Salerno if you can. From Ravello it is the nearer airport, and the road from it never touches the slow middle of the coast. For guests coming through Naples, we plan the transfers around the Amalfi Drive’s worst hours rather than the flight times.

Book the Ravello Festival into the weekend. Through the summer the festival puts concerts on the stage in Villa Rufolo’s gardens, above the sea, a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. A concert there is a welcome evening that no other venue on the coast can offer, and it costs a fraction of building one.

The buy-out gives you a palace: fifty rooms, the Wagner Gardens, the infinity pool, a restaurant, and the staff of a Michelin Key hotel for its own side of the day. What it does not give you is the wedding. The Caruso has no wedding planner, and does not pretend to.

The design, the flowers, the lighting, the production and the running of the day all sit with us, along with the ceremony in the town and the three nights around it.

Magic Day plans weddings at Belmond Hotel Caruso from the first conversation to the final farewell.

The part of the job that matters most here is the order of the evening. A dinner in the garden, a party at the pool until midnight and the last hours indoors is three different rooms and three different sound rules, and the art is in making those two moves feel like the night gathering pace rather than being moved along.